This ruff was made for the
category "Costuming - A Ruff" in the Kingdom A&S
comp run during 12th Night Coronation AS XXXVIII, in Krae Glas, Lochac, which I was unable to attend. This page is the (altered)
documentation I presented along with the ruff. Although the comp
didn't run, and thus my ruff wasn't judged, I still received
written feedback from the judges, which I was very happy with.

My thanks to Lady Katerina da Brescia for taking this photo, and
providing me with a copy. My thanks also to whichever gentle it
was that arranged my ruff (albeit inside-out) for the A&S table. I appreciate
it.

A Venetian
Open/Falling Ruff in the style popular circa 1570 - 1590s

"Along with
the Spanish Farthingale and the corset, the ruff is another of
the items that immediately spring to mind when people consider
Elizabethan costume."

Most people, when thinking of the ruff, would picture the usual
plate-shaped closed ruff common to many areas, especially
Elizabethan England. This style, however common elsewhere, as far
as I have been able to determine, was not seen in Venice until
perhaps the very last years of the sixteenth century, and the
evidence for the style then is scarce at best. I am therefore
attempting a style much more common in late sixteenth century
Venice - the style seen in the above 1590 woodcut by Cesare
Vecellio - "Venetian Noblewoman Dressed for a Public
Celebration" (Vecellio, p30)

This project was a re-working of a ruff I
had made previously, but which I was not totally happy with, and
which had been pulled apart. Since I already had an unfinished
ruff project, and no suitable fabric on hand, I chose to finish
it for this competition. It had already been machine-sewn from
pure cotton voile dress fabric. This fabric approximates the look
of the fine linens available in period. It is embellished with
machine-made cotton lace which is comparable in simplicity of
design to period bobbin-lace. In the above woodcut it appears
that the ruff is trimmed with something round-ish. It looks like
pearls to me, but since to use larger pearls was out of the
question for reasons of cost and weight, I have hand-trimmed the
ruff with seed pearls. I was aiming for a plausibly period
construction, simplicity and materials in keeping with a persona
of the nobility, and a semi-formal look. More detail on the
construction method to follow.

This image shows the vestigial ruff. It is impossible to
tell if the partlet and ruff are made from the same
fabric or not. The ruff appears to be plain, but the
partlet is clearly embellished with dot-like items,
possibly pearls.

By this time the ruff is
clearly attached to a stiff, upright neck band, which is
itself embellished with lace, jewels (perhaps brooches or
ouches) and pearls, to match the partlet.

A Brief History of the Venetian Ruff

Overall the ladies of sixteenth
century Venice did not take to the closed ruff. Beginning
about 1560, their partlets were embellished with open
ruffs, no more than frills or ruffles really, which were
at first small and attached - not to neck-bands - but
directly to the shirt/partlet body itself. (Fig 1, left)
As the century progressed the ruffs grew in size, as
indeed they did elsewhere, culminating in the large,
open, standing ruffs (by now the neckband to which they
were attached was visible) seen during the 1570s and
later (Fig 2, left). Matching shoulder-ruffs were a
peculiarity of Venice, seen in the 1570s and onwards. As
for the neck-ruffs, during the 1590s, both small and
large open falling ruffs, and larger standing ruffs were
in use at the same time. (See Fig 3, below)

Fig 3:
Detail from "Woman of the Venetian Nobility"
circa 1590, from Cesare Vecellio's Renaissance Costume
Book, New York, Dover Publications, 1977. Another style
of ruff in fashion at the same time as the open, falling
ruff.

Fig 4: Detail from Ludovico
Pozzoserrato's (Ludwig Toeput) "Concert in the
Garden", circa 1580s, Treviso, Museo Civico. This
shows the back view of the informal 'falling' ruff
attached to the partlet.

The style I have
chosen to re-create, the larger, open, 'falling' ruff,
(seen above in the Vecellio woodcut) was in use perhaps
for less formal occasions such as the "public
celebration" (see also Fig 4, left). This style is
sometimes referred to as a 'falling' ruff, because it
falls on the shoulders. As you can see, on these images
there is no evidence of the ruff being attached to a
neck-band. It is attached directly to the partlet. Since
partlets without attached ruffs continue to be seen in
Venetian art until the end of the sixteenth century (Fig
6, below), I hypothesise that ruffs could be either made
separately and attached to the partlet when required, or
could be a permanent part of the partlet. The pleats in
this style of ruff do not appear to have been starched
into regular pleats. Instead the pleats fall irregularly
around the neck, sometimes loosely as in the above
images, sometimes quite tightly (see Fig A, Below).

Fig A:
Detail from Portrait of a noblewoman by Francesco
Montemezzano, circa 1580s, Brunswick, Herzog Anton Ulrich
Museum. Despite the formality of the portrait, and the
matching lacy, box-pleated shoulder-ruffs, this ruff is
informally (irregularly) but closely pleated.

Fabrics And
Embellishment

The fabric used for ruffs, at least as far
as English documents show, appears to have been various
qualities, weights, and weaves of linen. Philip Stubbes, in his
Anatomie of Abuses, 1583, gives us a no doubt one-eyed view of
the sartorial excesses of his day, but does provide us with
information on all manner of clothing detail, such as ruffs. "They
have great and monsterous ruffes, made either of Camerick [also
called Cambrick by the same author elsewhere], Holland, Lawne, or
els of some other the finest cloth that can be got for
money..." (Leed, Stubbes, p4). These fabrics were all
made from flax linen in period, and even today,
"handkerchief lawn" and "handkerchief linen"
are interchangeable. ("C", "L", "H"
- Resil Textile Dictionary)

As far as Venetian ruffs go, I have found
that Florio's Worlde of Wordes, an Italian/English dictionary
written in the last years of the 1590s and published in 1598,
lists "Ghimphe", "Lattuche",
and "Ninfa", as words for ruff-bands. Ninfa
is given as the word for the most up-to-date (1598) style: "Ninfa
- ...also such ruff-bands as are worn nowadays".

Fig 5: Detail from Paolo Veronese's
Apotheosis of Venice, c1580, Venice, Palazzo Ducale. This
demonstrates the difference in opacity between partlet
and ruff.

It would appear that,
at least in some cases, the partlet itself may have
sometimes been made from a finer fabric than the ruff
attached to it. In a detail from Paolo Veronese's
"Apotheosis of Venice", circa 1580 (See Fig 5,
left), the woman on the left wears a very fine,
transparent partlet, to which a thicker, more opaque ruff
is attached. The woman on the right wears a semi-opaque
partlet and ruff. It is possible that it is a fine linen
ruff attached to a sheer silk partlet, but I guess it is
also possible that the sheer partlet is actually very
fine sheer linen, and the ruff only looks more opaque
because of the many folds. Unless and until I find a
period Italian text explaining how the ruffs were made we
can't be certain of anything. However, considering the
washing, starching and ironing that the ruff may have
been exposed to, it is likely that, as in England, it was
made of linen of some kind.

There is also a slight possibility, given the several references
to fustian, a mix of cotton and linen (History of Linen) in
Florio's Worlde of Wordes, an Italian/English dictionary of 1598,
and several other sources, that a partlet and ruff may have been
made from fustian. I have been told that there is argument for
the existence and use of a pure cotton fabric in Italy in the
late sixteenth century in Maureen Mazzaoui's The Italian Cotton
Industry in the Later Middle Ages 1100-1600: "The
versatility of cotton cloth recommended it to wealthy customers
for certain articles of clothing, accessories and home
furnishings, although it never totally displaced the much coveted
fine linens of the North in the wardrobes of the rich."
However, since I have not yet thoroughly read through the book (I
was unable to obtain a copy), and am relying on someone else's
notes, I am more inclined to believe that the nobility would have
chosen to have their ruffs made from imported and costly fine
linen fabrics.

The ruff I made is made from pure cotton
dress fabric, which approximates the look of the fine linens
available in period. I do own some "hanky weight"
linen, but find that the modern heaviness and coarseness of it
does not lend itself well to use on fine, delicate items such as
ruff and partlets.

Stubbes is also very forthcoming as to the
embellishment that English ruffs received. "They are
either clogged with golde, silver, or silk lace of stately price,
wrought all over with needle woork, speckled and sparkled heer
and there.... some with purled lace so cloyed, and other gewgaws
so pestered....."(Leed, Stubbes, p4). On looking for
documentation of the embellishment used on English ruffs, I found
black work, spangles, needle lace and pearls used to great
effect. I was especially keen to find documentation for the use
of pearls on ruffs (See 1b, 2b, 3b, Below), since it appears to
me that the ruff worn in the Vecellio woodcut is trimmed with
them. Of course, it is possible that the round-ish objects are
something else altogether.

Fig 1b: Detail from portrait of
Frances Sidney, Countess of Sussex by an artist of the Anglo-Netherlandish School, c.1570-75. <<http://www.tudor-portraits.com/FrancisSidney.jpg>> . This ruff is embellished
with a black-worked or black lace edging and pearls.

Fig
2b: Detail from portrait of an unknown lady, circa 1595,
Tate Gallery, by Marcus Gheeraerts II. It is made
completely from lace and trimmed with pearls.<<http://www.tate.org.uk/magazine/issue4/pearlyqueen_image1.htm>>

Fig 6: Portrait of a young woman by
Gortzius Geldorp, c1599, Private Collection. The partlet
appears to be made from lacis, and is adorned with needle
lace along the edges. The exclusively Venetian shoulder
ruffs may be attached to the partlet, but despite this
there is no neck ruff present, which supports the theory
of separate ruffs.

The most common type
of embellishment seen on Venetian ruffs is lace (see Figs
2 and 3 above, and 6, left). By the late sixteenth
century both bobbin and needle lace were well known and
used in Venice. Venetian needle lace in particular, was
much sought after. Needle lace is used to adorn the
neckline of the partlet and ruff, and there is evidence
from Italy for the partlet, if not the ruff itself, being
made from lacis (embroidered net lace, see Fig A, above),
known there as lavori di maglia (Parasole
p42-46) . I have not seen definitive evidence for the use
of bobbin lace, or merletti a piombini, (Parasole p33-41) on partlets and ruffs in Venice, but
taking into account the relative ease, and thus economy,
with which it was made, I would guess that it is not out
of the realm of possibility for bobbin lace to have been
used in such a fashion. I am not a lace maker (yet!) so I
have chosen to use a modern machine-made cotton lace,
whose twisted threads are close in design to simple bobbin-laces. (See Fig B Below, Roseveth p1)

Fig B:
Image from Nuw Modelbuch showing a bobbin lace similar to
the cotton machine-made lace I have used for my ruff and
partlet.
<http://www.havenonline.com/bobbinlace/page1.htm>

As for pearls on Venetian ruffs, I have no definitive evidence
that they were used in such a way*, since the woodcut I used for
inspiration was not clear enough to determine whether the 'blobs'
on the ruff's edge were pearls or not. However, pearls were very
much in evidence on Venetian clothing, and, according to one
eye-witness account, pearls were used on ruffs in other parts of
Italy during the same period: "In the Museo Civico Medievale
in Bologna hangs a small portrait of a woman dressed in black
velvet late 1500s, [ascertained to be 1580s], the entire dress
and the ruff is covered in pearls." (E-mail from Massaria de Cortona)

*Since writing this I have since found
this portrait
of a woman by Giovanni Battista Moroni, circa 1570s(?), who was probably
painting a citizen of the Venetian mainland province of Bergamo. She appears to
have pearls attached to her ruff.

How I Made
It

1.The partlet pattern
was made using a slightly altered version of the "historical" cut on The
Renaissance Tailor web site (see Fig C, below), omitting the
collar. Since it utilises rectangular construction methods,
with very little wastage of fabric, I find this a plausible
cut for a late sixteenth century Venetian partlet* .I chose to
use lace ties at the sides. All cut edges were very narrowly
hemmed by machine.

*Since writing this
I have changed my opinion on the cut/style of the late sixteenth century
Venetian partlet, although the Florentine partlet seems to be very similar
to this style. More about this will be forthcoming.

Fig C: Detail
from image used on The Renaissance Tailor: Partlets. <<http://vertetsable.com/demos_partlets.htm>>

2. The ruff was
created using the gather/pleat method seen on Drea Leed's
"Constructing Elizabethan Ruffs" as a guide. Three
strips of full-width cotton fabric (selvedge to selvedge)
were french seamed together to make one long strip of fabric.
I did not use mathematical equations to work out how long
this should be, because I don't believe that it was done in
period. Instead, I believe fabric was cut to best advantage.
This warp-wise method of cutting is plausible, as it uses a
limited amount of fabric. It is also plausible that, in
period, two, three or more ruffs were cut from one long
length of fabric along the weft.

3. The sides and one
long edge of the ruff strip were likewise hemmed, and then
cotton lace was sewn over the hemmed edges.

4. The un-hemmed edge
of the ruff strip was gathered by means on two rows of
machine-stitching along the very edge. This stitching was
pulled up by hand to form lots of tiny, close-set
gathers/pleats, and the ends of the threads were knotted
together to temporarily hold the pleats in place.

5. The ruff was then
pinned in place along the neckline of the partlet, and
machine-sewn down over the hemmed edge of the partlet. This
seam was then enclosed by overcasting with close machine
zig-zag stitches.

6. Starting at one end
of the partlet neckline opening, lace was machine-stitched in
place over the hemmed edges.

7. The lace on both
partlet and ruff was then hand beaded using faux seed pearls.

Note:
Machine-sewing for hemming and application of lace was utilised
for two reasons. 1 Entering the A&S comp was, once again, a
last-minute decision, so it was a time-saving measure. and 2. The
partlet and ruff strip had already been machine hemmed when I
decided to take the ruff apart and re-work it to my liking. In
period it would have all been sewn by hand.

The end result was a ruff
and partlet that, whilst it cannot claim to be completely period
authentic, is very close in look and feel to the Venetian open,
falling, informal style of ruff which inspired it. A ruff fit for
any "Venetian Celebration".